For almost all players, your first coins will be earned by completing quests. You can view a full list of the core quests and their rewards—most of them including coins—here. Of particular note are the quests A Mature Dragon, Dragon Transformation, and Hiccup’s Tale. The first two are repeatable quests that will award you 50 coins each time you age up a dragon* and the last is currently glitched in such a way that players can repeat it as many times as they wish. However, since Hiccup’s Tale only pays five coins and costs at least eight coins in order to purchase bait for the required fishing step, players will find themselves losing coins this way and should probably only use this method as a way to reduce the cost of fishing for a dragon’s meals.

Only applies when aging a dragon using a quest from Hiccup. Using a Dragon Age-Up Ticket will not award anything but your dragon becoming an adult or a Titan

Turning in jobs to the Job Board is one of the most profitable ways to earn coins. For plays with Deep Sea, Improved, or Advanced Fishing Rods, Eels are worth the most out of all the kinds of fish eligible to be turned in to the job board.

A list of farming jobs can be found here, with information of how many coins you need to spend to complete the job and how much you’ll gain in profit.

Fireball Frenzy, Thunder Run Racing, Eel Roast, and Alchemy Adventure all award coins as part of their rewards. Thunder Run Racing always gives out 25 coins while Eel Roast and Alchemy Adventure give out different amounts of coins depending on your score; please see their respective pages for more information about rewards based on score.

When participating in battle events, players have the chance to earn coins from the prize chests. See the battle events page for more details on which prize tiers have a chance to give out set amounts of coins.

Most Stable Missions award at least a small sum of coins. While not a particularly fast way of earning coins, non-members can have up to four quests active at a time while members can have up to six quests running at once. You can see a list of stable missions and their rewards here.

When first introduced on 8/8/13, Inviting a Friend awarded 200 coins instead of the 50 gems it now gives out.

Much more popular was the ability to earn coins (as well as Dragon Bonding XP) by lighting a fire pit five times. Initially this method gave out 150 coins per five fire pits lit. Sometime between 9/19/13 and 10/1/13, the coin payout was lowered from 150 gold to five gold before being removed entirely on an unknown date.